Mirwaiz Attacked In Chandigarh

25 November 2011Kashmir Observer

Chandigarh: Kashmir’s Chief Priest, Mirwaiz Umer Farooq, was heckled and roughed up by activists of an extremist Hindu organization and a group of Kashmiri Pandits during a seminar here this morning. Slogan shouting group of Pandit activists, accompanied by members of VHP, who had intruded into the seminar hall at Kisan Bhavan created ruckus soon after Mirwaiz began to speak. Some of the activists jumped on to the dais where Mirwaiz, who also heads the moderate faction of Hurriyat Conference, was seated and pounced upon him, reports said. Eyewitnesses said in the melee, when the activists punched the Mirwaiz in the face, he fell from his chair. Organisers immediately threw a protective ring around Mirwaiz and police which was standing by also stepped in and rescued Kashmiri leader. In Srinagar a police spokesman said, 'The Mirwaiz was safe and the miscreants have been arrested.' The incident comes over a month after Pandit activists created chaos at a seminar on Kashmir in Delhi when another Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani was addressing it along with noted activist and author Arundhati Roy. Earlier, on November 4, Democratic Freedom Party (DFP) chairman Shabir Shah was attacked by activists of the Bharatiya Janata Party youth wing in Jammu. BJP workers stormed a local hotel where Shah was addressing a press conference after his release after year long imprisonment. They vandalised furniture and shouted slogans against Shah and Kashmiri movement. Reacting to the incident, Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Omar Abdullah described the attack on Mirwaiz Umar Farooq in Chandigarh as a 'reaction to the kind of politics and policy' of the separatist leaders.